After feeling bad that I was neglecting my bag of Lee filters, I managed to get outdoors and use them for the second time in one week.

It's been pouring with rain in Cape Town the last couple of days, and roads are turning to rivers, but fortunately the day before the rain started produced a brilliant sunset. On a tip-off fromHougaard Malan that the clouds would be good, I left work a bit early and braved the rush hour traffic to Dolphin Beach with its picture-postcard view of Table Mountain. Whew, it's stressful to be watching the sun going down while stuck in gridlock traffic, trying to get to the beach in time. But I did make it in time, and spent a good hour and a half taking a load of shots. Everything just calms down the moment you get your legs (and your tripod's legs) in the water and see this view. What a great city to live in!

There's something super relaxing about shooting with filters. When you're choosing between several filters and combos, assembling filter holders and adapter rings, all while trying not to get sand and fingerprints everywhere, you just need to slow right down. Then, once your kit is all assembled and your composition chosen, its just a matter of shooting away as the light changes and making sure the sea doesn't wash all your expensive kit away. Getting your filters right also saves a huge amount of time on Photoshop later, with less or no need to combine multiple images to get the exposure right. I must have only spent ten minutes processing this image later that evening.

This shot was taken after the sun had already gone down, all the dog walkers had left, and the magical blue hour had started. I enjoy the way the slow shutter speed blurs the water.

My wife Lorna and I took a drive out to Slangkop Lighthouse near Kommetjie this weekend hoping for some good sunset photography. It was a fun drive through the beautiful Chapman's Peak, watching the storm clouds over the ocean, but it ended up being pretty cold and bleak at Kommetjie with not much break in the clouds. Still, it was fun to experiment with my under-utilised Lee filters and try some long exposure shots. This one was a thirty second exposure in rapidly falling light, and blurred the clouds and water in an interesting way. These big glass filters are fiddly and slippery things, and I'm waiting to drop one on a rock. That will be a sad and expensive day.

According to my googling, Slangkop ('snake head') is the tallest cast iron lighthouse on the South African coast. It started operation in 1919 and is the fourth most powerful lighthouse in the country. I hadn't realised that lighthouses could be pre-fabricated cast iron structures, and it was interesting seeing close up that what I had always assumed was a masonry structure was actually made of large metal panels.

I took this shot during the beautiful 'blue hour' period, just after sunset, when the sky fills with rich and mysterious blue tones. But I prefer the image in black and white, so I'm not sure I can call this a blue hour shot.

I had some fun last week with my new neutral density filters. For those who don't know them, they allow you to do a couple of cool things, and this photo features two different kinds. The first is a common or garden variety neutral density filter, which just looks like a sheet of dark grey glass. It uniformly reduces the light to the camera, allowing one to take longer exposures than normal. This shot was a several minute exposure which is why the sea is starting to smooth out and the clouds have become smudgey. The second kind of neutral density filter I used here is a gradient neutral density filter. This is a piece of glass where half is clear, and half is dark grey to reduce light. You position it so that the grey part is over the sky, and the change from clear to grey is exactly on the horizon. This lets you balance the exposure of the sea and the sky. If you don't do it, you'll find that the sky will overexpose and be too bright. It's the old fashioned alternative to using HDR.

For those who care about the technicalities, I used a Lee 0.9 ND Filter combined with a Lee 0.9 Hard Grad ND. It was a 180 second exposure at f8. I had to photoshop Venus back into a dot shape, because it had turned into quite a light trail after that amount of time.

The photo was taken from the rocks at Clifton Fourth Beach on a chilly autumn evening. It's hard to see, but the spikey edge to the dark rocks is actually dozens of roosting sea birds.

I've been curious for a while about how Kogel Bay got its name. Kogel is Dutch for bullets and musket balls and things like that. It's been suggested that the early Dutch settlers at the Cape thought that the round boulders common on this stretch of coastline resembled cannon balls, hence the name Kogel Bay. I even read a description that suggested that the round boulders rolling around in the waves sound like cannon balls loose on the deck of a pitching ship, but I didn't find any noisy boulders like that on the day I went.

Nor any sharks fortunately.

Before and After

No Photomatix was used in the making of this image. But even so this is sort of, but not quite, an HDR. I took two exposures, one for the sky and one for the rocks, and blended them by hand. This effectively expands the tonal range of the image like HDR does, but in a far more subtle and controlled way than Photomatix.

After that I used some selective contrast, saturation and sharpening to make the image pop.

In the old city of Sultanahmet the streets are thrumming with tourists and markets and restaurants and vendors at most times of the day or night. This lively ground level is replicated up in the sky, where every hotel jostles to have the highest roof terrace with some view of the minarets and the sea. This roofscape is the world that tourists inhabit for breakfast and dinner and sundowner drinks, and perhaps reach a vague nodding acquaintance with their counterparts on the adjacent roof terraces.

This was the view from our particular terrace one beautiful dusk in autumn last year. That's the Blue Mosque in the background, just a few minutes walk away. A benefit of staying this close to the Blue Mosque (apart from it being one of the great buildings of the world, of course) was waking every morning to the beautifully evocative call to prayer. There are apparently some 3,000 mosques in Istanbul and it's quite impressive when they all start the call just before dawn. It makes you remember that you are somewhere very exotic and far from home from the moment you wake up each morning.

... and another jump to the left. Or a skip if you prefer. If you got that right, you should now be facing 180 degrees from the view of the Twelve Apostles that I posted recently. I promised the about-face view and here it is. Pretty awesome, huh?

This view takes in the magnificent beaches of Clifton, numbered First through Fourth Beach, with Clifton Fourth being closest to the camera, and Lion's Head in the background. At full moon you will see dozens of torches marking the route up Lion's Head as hikers head up for a night time view. The Clifton water is very, very cold, and can drop below 10 degrees Celsius ... come mid-winter the crazies gather here for the annual Polar Bear Swim. You would probably want to be our local human polar bear, Lewis Gordon Pugh, to really enjoy swimming here for more than a rapid squeal-inducing and instantly-numbing dip.

This photo, and the Twelve Apostles view, were both taken quite a few months ago, in the middle of winter on an unseasonably pleasant day. Now that summer has arrived and one would expect, nay, demand, that the weather be perfect, it is no longer cooperating at all, and I feel I must have wronged it somehow.

Every recent opportunity to spend the evening after work in this exact location has been thwarted by gale force winds. We've had barely minutes to contemplate the five sand-blasted nutters on the beach, and lone sad yacht with mast at 45 degrees, before conceding defeat and doing a runner back home for Star Wars and pizza. Perhaps a weather dance is required? Or the sacrifice of some G&T?

But I live in hope of better weather, and more chance to photograph here without having to lash down the tripod with all the tow-rope and industrial epoxy I can muster from my boot.

Before and After

This gives a great indication of how HDR can really get stuck into those under-exposed shadow areas and reveal all the detail and texture hiding in there. This was a three exposure bracket at -2, 0 and +2 exposure settings, combined later in Photomatix. The shots were taken just after sunset, during that blue hour when colours deepen and richen with the diminishing twilight. A tripod was essential with the low light conditions, and I used the lowest ISO possible to minimize sensor noise. Noise likes to accumulate most in the under-exposed parts of the image, and is amplified by HDR, so I keep the ISO set to 100, and applied noise reduction later to my preliminary HDR image as the first step of my post-processing workflow, using my personal favourite noise reduction Photoshop plugin, Nik Dfine 2.

Last time I showed you a favourite spot of mine at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Here is another Cape Town favourite, about 10 minutes from home in the other direction. When leaving home, the important decision making process goes something like this:

lazy afternoon? go to Kirstenbosch with a book

sundowner time? go and sit right on top of this rock with a glass of wine

bad weather? stay in and watch Barney Stinson do his thing

If you were a therapist, unless you were being tactful, you would probably say that this post is a slightly sad case of wish fulfillment. You see, we had planned to go and sit here yesterday evening after work to watch the sun go down and let the stress of the week wash off. We had popcorn, chips, gin, tonic, basically all the ingredients of a healthy meal, but the weather didn't come to the party. The wind has been howling at gale force the last few days, so even standing here was quite tricky. I know, because we tried! But our endurance lasted about five minutes. Never mind, there's always next week, and neeeext week (which is what we call the one after that in Cape Town, you know, the neeeeext one).

This view is of the Twelve Apostles, which is that range of buttresses looming over Camps Bay below. I've tried to count all twelve, but I'm not really getting it. It's just after sunset, which is when you get that beautiful period of 'blue hour' when all the colors soften and richen. This is a three exposure HDR, taken on a tripod, and I was able to use the HDR technique to get a good exposure on both the foreground rocks and the sky. That's Venus up in the sky, by the way. The image was a little softer off the camera than it ought to be, which puzzled me immensely, until I found I had done enough traveling with my lens that the front element was unscrewing itself. A whole day of puzzling and testing and googling, but the solution took 2 secs. In this case, I think the softness suits the soft light and tones.

If you turn 90 degrees from this view it's just sea all the way to Rio de Janeiro, and another 90 degrees is an equally beautiful view of Clifton and Lion's Head, but I'm keeping that for a future post. Stay tuned!